Sexuality, Relationships, Marriage, and Family Life

Mary-Beth Yount, Neumann University (PA)

yountm@neumann.edu

Craig A. Ford, Jr., Saint Norbert College (WI)

craig.ford@snc.edu

This year’s conference theme--Human Families: Identity, Relationships, Responsibilities--provides a special opportunity for this section to consider anew how evolutions in the human experience of intimacy and kinship provide new topographies for our affective and social worlds in and through confrontation with existing understandings of intimacy, kinship, and social life. What are the contours of this new reality that we are entering, and what theological resources can be brought to understand it? The Sexuality, Relationships, Marriage, and Family Life section warmly invites papers, panel proposals, and as well as workshop proposals in order to shed light on some aspect of this question(s). Preference will be shown to proposals that explicitly engage the conference theme.

Potential topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• The significance of enculturation on Catholic conceptions of family life, singleness, sexualities, and relationships.
• Challenges generated as a result of magisterial teaching regarding local conceptions of marriage/family and sexualities.
• The role of feminist as well LGBT and queer advocacy in shaping new or shifting conceptions of relationships, families, and sexuality within a global church.
• Discourses around intimate relationships and sexual practices that are engaged either positively or negatively within the church and/or in the larger society.
• Interdisciplinary considerations of dating, marriage, families, childrearing in the global context and their significance for Catholic reflection.
• Trends or transitions in Catholic conceptions on singleness, relationships, or parenthood in the last half-century.
• The historical and ethical significance of recent events within the Catholic Church, including the synods on the family and the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetita.
• The awareness that global feminisms have of injustice, violence, and abuse within sexual encounters, relationships, and family life.
• The effects of migration policies on families and relationships in the wake of global nationalist movements.
• Intersectional analyses of race, class, and nation on sexual practices, intimacies, and family structures.
• The effects that climate change and the globalization of capitalism have on sexual practices, family structures, and the population of the planet.
• The ways in which family life, marriage, sexuality, or dating may be a site for not only flourishing but injustice, suffering, and violence.
• The ways in which family support services (both within and outside of the Church) engage care for LGBTQ+ persons as well as for “nontraditional” families.

Proposals should be 250-500 words in length and include one’s current institutional affiliation and position. Proposals should be emailed to both conveners by December 15, 2019. Scholars will be notified of the status of their proposals by mid-January.